Despite Christian & Right-wing Opposition Spain Approves Euthanasia

LAST December we reported that Spain’s Health Minister, Salvador Illa, above, strongly defended a vote to legalise euthanasaia and assisted suicide, saying that they would be integrated into the country’s national health care service as a ‘benefit.’

The vote needed to be passed by Congress before legalisation could take place, and it’s reported today that it did so this week with 202 MPs voting in favor of the law, 141 against it, and another 2 abstaining.

Prior to the December vote the Spanish Evangelical Alliance (AEE) released a statement opposing the decision and called on the government to promote the development of model for terminally ill patients that combines access to palliative care with family and economic support.

The Catholic Church also stuck its nose into the issue. According to this report, in response to the growing demand among Spaniards for euthanasia, in September the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith reiterated church teaching in the letter “Samaritanus Bonus.”

Spanish bishops published their own letter on the issue last December, “Sowers of Hope,” in which they reminded Catholics that:

There is no one that can’t be cared for even if they are incurable.

The bishops called for a day of prayer and fasting on the eve of the law’s vote and have encouraged the faithful to include explicit instructions in their advanced directives that they do not wish to be euthanised.

Last October, New Zealand became the first country to legalise euthanasia through referendum. Physician-assisted suicide is also legal in Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Colombia, the Australian state of Victoria and eight US states.

Ireland has also taken steps to legalising euthanasia, and courts in Germany, Italy and Austria recently handed down decisions that could that open the way for its legalisation.

Euthanasia broke into the public consciousness in Spain in the 1990s, when Ramón Sampedro, above, a quadriplegic, began a series of lawsuits seeking assistance to end his life, reaching up as far as the European Commission on Human Rights. He lost in every court.

In 1998, his family and friends helped him carry out a plan to end his life with cyanide so that no one could be convicted of assisting in his suicide.

Several days later, his close friend Ramona Maneiro was arrested and charged with assisting his suicide. Sampedro had divided the elements required to complete his suicide into individual tasks, each small enough that no single person could be convicted of assisting the suicide process entirely.

Maneiro was released due to lack of evidence. No further charges were ever filed in connection with Sampedro’s death.

His story was turned into the Oscar-winning 2004 movie The Sea Inside.

Since then, almost a dozen attempts to decriminalise euthanasia were made in the Spanish parliament without becoming law. During the 2019 national elections, the Socialist presidential candidate, Pedro Sánchez, pledged to make euthanasia legal should he be elected.

That pledge followed on the heels of the highly publicised death of María José Carrasco. Carrasco, 61, had suffered from multiple sclerosis for 30 years. Her husband, Ángel Hernández, filmed her asking him to help her end her life several days in a row and then gave her a drink laced with a lethal dose of medication.

All parties, except for the conservative People’s Party and the Navarrese People’s Union as well as far-right Vox, backed the law. Right-wing groups have already pledged to repeal it.